Chicago, Illinois
Time: Friday February 23rd – Sunday February 25th 2024


Friday - Legacy Cup HJ

Welcome to Work, Here's Your Tournament!
All I knew before Friday morning was that I was on some flavour of side events. I reported in like normal, at 11:30. At about 11:40 the Area Lead came over to greet our team and lay down a few ground rules. They began outlining a few basic things about the area and mentioned that we had a Legacy Cup event starting at 12pm, it was capped at 128 players and was a 7 round Comp REL event with a cut to top 8. He then turned to me and said "Tobi, can you run this?" and I nodded and I asked my team lead whether I could spend the next 20 minutes hammering out the details of my event instead of telling everyone on the squad what my favourite color was, the TL felt this was good idea and let me go. After a little bit of running around I managed to dig up a cover sheet and set up my boards, there were no promos (luckily) but there were a lot of tix and boy was handing them out a nuisance. Each player got 600 and 1200 were to go in the middle. The issue here is that there were no "600 tix" denominations, there were 200s and 400s, and then 1000s. This meant that each round I had to awkwardly go by with 200s, then again with 400s then a third time with 1000s. Additionally, save for the first round (where I had some of the other team members to help), often it was just me handing out the tix on my own. This meant there were a few rounds where it took about 10 minutes to hand out all the tix. When it got quieter I would pre-sort the tix into stacks of 600, but that was also the part of the day where all events were fighting over the last ten 200 tix vouchers in the entire hall that weren't shoved in a player's pocket.

The next awkward thing was how to handle infractions, I had no access to MTGMelee, which meant I had no way to record infractions, I was told to run it at "Comp REL light", which was "execute comp REL fixes, and issue warnings, but don't record the penalties. As I was the only one on the event, not recording penalties tended to work normally anyways, since if someone did accrue multiple penalties, I would either remember, or they'd remind me when I asked, or both, and I would be able to upgrade as normal (which rarely happens anyways). Upon reflection what I should've instead done, is just had all penalties written down on a piece of paper or a phone or something. Then I would've had my own record instead of... nothing. In the hectic whirl of the day though, I didn't think of this.

The next, next awkward thing was decklists. There was a lot of confusion from players as to whether decklists were actually required or not, I ended up ruling it like LCQs: hand them in before round one if you have them, if not, finish round 1 then write it out and hand it in. It's not like I could check against a list to see who was missing lists or not, as some of them were in MTGmelee, which again, I didn't have access to. I could've asked for a player list and checked the lists against it, but realistically I just didn't have time to do that,

A Sticky Situation
I dislike stickers. But unfortunately they're very good in legacy right now so I had to answer about half a dozen questions about them. The biggest one was players being concerned about how to register the stupid things on their decklist. I just said "make is sensible" and called it a day. You listed the stickers on the back? Great job. You wrote the stickers in a corner and labelled them as "stickers"? Good job. You put them with the sideboard? That's fine. You literally stuck the stickers to the decklist? Whatever. The next thing I learned was that the MTR literally authorizes proxies of sticker sheets. (MTR 3.18) There was also some post event argument about whether presenting a sticker deck with no sticker cards in your library was legal. Personally, I don't care unless your rounds start going to time, at which point I'd probably pull the player aside and tell them that they need to stop since it's having a detrimental impact on their games 'ability to finish in time. Barring temporal concerns though, I'm a big fan of bluffing to eke out percentage points.

Informed Doom
AP casts Doomsday, is NAP entitled to know what was taken from the GY with it? Yes, Doomsday reads "Search your library and graveyard for five cards and exile the rest. Put the chosen cards on top of your library in any order..." NAP has an opportunity after AP has chosen the five cards and exiled everything else, but before the cards are moved to the library to see what they are. In a real life call, a judge could just ask AP to reveal the cards that were taken from the graveyard to their opponent.

State-Based Replacements
AP controls Bloodletter of Aclazotz and is casting Death Cloud with X=3. NAP is at 6 life, and controls Enduring Angel, and The Golden Throne. This is fairly complex so let's go through it. First Bloodletter sees that NAP is losing 3 life and changes that to 6 life. Then Enduring Angel sees that we're going to 0 life and initiates it's replacement effect, preparing to transform and make NAP's life total 3, instead of the regularly scheduled event of "lose 6 life". The Golden Throne never comes up because the event its trying to replace is the state-based action of NAP dying, which won't happen because NAP won't ever be at 0 or less life. (CR614.6) After assessing all replacement effects Death Cloud carries out its instructions in order, first each player loses, life, except NAP's life total becomes three and Enduring Angel is transformed. Then each player sacrifices three creatures etc etc.

Saturday – Duel Commander HJ

Chaos Commences
Chicago was a sold out show. Every standby judge was activated and we were still slightly understaffed. It really felt like every judge for themselves on Saturday. I recall at one point seeing another judge take one of my tape loops off the board and put it elsewhere. At another point in the day someone moved my pairings off to the side to make way for their pairings. Finally later on another judge came by and stole two chairs from my event.

Saturday was definitely one of the days of all time. To be very clear I found all of this hilarious and simply a hallmark of how chaotic Saturday was, sometimes, you gotta put up pairings and stealing loops is simply the only way because the tape has gallivanted off into ODEs never to be seen again. Sometimes, your event needs chairs right now and you can't wait for the union or whatever to talk to five different managers to authorize additional chairs.

Duel Commander
In a similar vein to Friday, I ended up as head judge of the Duel Commander event, but luckily I had an hour of runway before my event, and I only had 60ish players instead of 128. The decklist policy was even more relaxed on Saturday and I was instructed to only get decklists from the top 8, which meant that when it came to top 8 everyone had to sit down for 20 minutes and write out a 100 card singleton decklist. Aside from some weird decklist rules, Duel Commander itself presented its own suite of issues. Duel Commander is a community created format whose rules reside on The Duel Commander website. I spent some of the hour before my event reading over this page, in doing this I learned the following things: games were best 2 out of 3 like normal, but players started at 20 life and commander damage didn't exist. I also took a careful look over the banlist and kept it open for legality questions during the event. Something else interesting to note is the fact that like all "Cup" events the prizes for this one were, aside from the wad of tix given out every round, a trophy for first place and special top 8 mats for the players that made the cut. Amusingly enough, the artwork featured on the Duel Commander top 8 mat was none other than Sol Ring. (If you don't see the punchline, please check the Duel Commander banlist)

Bye, Bye Proxies
AP got a bye in round one, and while they were placidly chatting to some other players, they became aware that some of the cards in their deck were banned in Duel Commander, as it has a separate banned list from regular Commander. They let me know this and asked if they could change decks to something that wasn't full of banned cards. I shrugged and noted that there were no decklists, and the alternative was having them replace most of their deck with basics, which would probably result in them just dropping. Additionally, if they'd just done this without asking, there would've been no way for me to find out, really. This certainly felt awkward, but they really hadn't actually played any Magic, so like.... eh? Later on in the round a spectator brought to my attention a player that was playing with a deck that was largely obvious proxies (pieces of paper slipped into sleeves) I spoke with the player, who was quite upset that the "proxy-free" nature of the event wasn't better advertised. I tried to console them the best I could, while still being firm about the rules, but they were pretty disheartened. After a few minutes they returned to me and asked if they could switch decks. I thought about it, and mused that I had allowed another player to do it, and while this player had played some Magic, unlike the other player, they had also gotten a match loss for the issue. This coupled with the fact that it was fairly clear they were just clueless and weren't trying to angle shoot the field, made me agree to the proposition, even though both of those calls made me feel a bit icky. At the same time, if the TO wanted strict rules moderation they likely would've had a harder policy on decklists and infractions. I'm still not 100% sure both of these were the correct call, and certainly in a more competitive environment I'd have likely been harsher on the rules.

A Partner Indeed
In round 5 I shadowed a call at a table where NAP mentioned that they thought there was some special partner rule regarding Duel Commander. I looked to the judge that had initially taken the call and we both shrugged and didn't think there was a rule like that. NAP seemed disconcerted, but looking up Duel Commander rules was a great deal more difficult than looking up normal rules in the CR, and I felt like it would take a while for me to prove or disprove the existence of this rule. About 10 minutes later I found a spare moment and did some searching, and after five minutes of scrambling around I found that Duel Commander did indeed have a partner ruling. If AP was playing with partner commanders, as soon as they cast their first commander they couldn't cast their second one that game. This was bizarre and weird, but was in fact, the rule. I returned to the table, apologized and informed the players of the correct ruling. NAP was rightfully kinda upset, since they had known the correct ruling but were brushed off by me and another judge AND the ruling had definitely impacted their game. I certainly felt bad about the whole thing, I pondered for a moment and decided to use deviation powers to fix the problem. I went up to the front and tried to ask the area lead for authorization to award both players a match win. The area lead was kind of overloaded and said "Tobi, whatever thing you're about to do is probably fine, just do it" (for the record I cycled back around later and the area lead confirmed this was, in fact, fine). I let the players know what had happened and once again apologized. This was pretty goofy and I think not even attempting to check was definitely a mistake, I should've at least tried to find it, and if it proved difficult/time consuming given it my best shot.

A secondary question that came up was whether if AP used Command Beacon to get their other partner, would they be able to cast it? Weirdly enough, yes, due to the fact that the rule restricting casting partner commanders only refers to casting them from the command zone.

Charizard Doesn't Have Trample
AP attacked with four 2/2 tokens from Forth Eorlingas! NAP blocked two of the tokens with 1/1s and said "take four?" AP said "no, you're dead, they have trample", NAP felt that AP misrepresented the tokens, because they were using pokemon cards, and that it should be CPV. I think it's very easy to think this might be CPV, and a backup is tempting, but there is no requirement that AP use tokens that have all the correct qualities on them, only that the tokens can be either tapped or untapped clearly. If NAP is confused by the game layout they can always call a judge and ask for a token to clear things up, not every judge is going to have tokens, but we are usually willing to whip up some kind of sharpied piece of cardboard.

Converted Nonsense
AP controls Lazotep Convert copying Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal which dies, what happens? Lazotep Convert will return to the battlefield with its back side face up, and AP will be able to copy another thing. When Aclazotz says "return it to the battlefield transformed" it means "return it to the battlefield with its back face up" which has a weird interaction with Lazotep Convert, which already has its back face up. (CR712.2)

Truly Splendid
AP casts Splendid Reclamation and returns Echoing Deeps and an Island from the graveyard, can AP choose to have Echoing Deeps become a copy of the Island? Yes. When assessing what replacement effects to apply, Echoing Deeps is still in AP's graveyard, along with the Island, and thus the Island can be copied.

Who Has Priorities?
The following is a bit of a dramatization of something that came up, in the actual scenario the FJ's policy knowledge was fairly solid and the HCE wasn't that complex, which made my decision much simpler. However the scenario is significantly more interesting to think about when those knobs are tweaked a bit, which is why it's presented in the way it is here.

AP comes up to you and says "judge I've lost my 6k legacy deck" and looks like they're about to have a full on meltdown in front of you. Before you have the opportunity to ask whether they've checked xyz locations for it, a FJ that has somewhat shaky policy comes up to you and says "I want to double check a complex HCE". I told the FJ "Just do whatever I trust you" and focused my attention on legacy guy. But I think in retrospect telling HCE guy to wait isn't a big deal since I'm likely escalating legacy guy to the TO anyways. Another option is telling HCE guy to tag out with me and take legacy guy to the TO while I deal with the HCE.


Sunday – ODE Floor Judge

I Demand On-Demands!
I wanted to work ODEs once at a Magiccon to see what the system was like. Players bought "event vouchers" from the front desk, and would sit in a designated event waiting area, which was labelled with a sign. Once the area filled up with 8 players for any specific format, they'd raise their hand and call for a judge, who would take two event vouchers each from them and report to the front of the ODE area for a bracket, product (if necessary) and directions to an open spot in the room to seat the players. The bracket and ODE was run completely manually from that point, whenever the players started a match they'd call for a judge to drop the prize tix on the table, the judge would also sign off on the paper that they'd paid out that match. This, of course, didn't always work, and often players would call way after the start of their match. At the very end players would return the bracket to a judge who would return that bracket to the front of the room and would mark off the space previously occupied by the ODE as empty.

...In Conclusion
I had a great time at MC Chicago, it was busy and big and awesome! I definitely enjoyed Sunday less than the other two days, while I was excited to learn the ODE system and work in it, it becomes boring pretty quickly, and I do vastly prefer working Comp REL events. Friday and Saturday were nice because I was just responsible for a single Comp REL adjacent event and got to just kinda hang out in my corner of the room and take care of my players. Overall I had a great time and hope that I can go to more Magiccons in the future!